Maggie Smith, star of stage, screen and “Downton Abbey,” dies at 89

LONDON (AP) — Maggie Smith, the masterful, scene-stealing actress who won an Oscar in 1969 for “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” and won new fans in the 21st century as Professor Minerva McGonagall, the Dowager Countess of Grantham in “Downton Abbey.” from the Harry Potter films died on Friday. She was 89.

Smith’s sons Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens said in a statement that Smith died early Friday in a London hospital.

“She leaves behind two sons and five loving grandchildren who are devastated by the loss of their extraordinary mother and grandmother,” said a statement from publicist Clair Dobbs.

Smith was often regarded as the preeminent British actress of a generation that included Vanessa Redgrave and Judi Dench, with a string of Oscar nominations and a shelf full of acting trophies.

She remained in demand in her later years, although she lamented that “in the grandma era you can be lucky to get something.”

Smith dryly summarized her later roles as “a gallery of grotesques,” including Professor McGonagall. When asked why she took the role, she quipped: “Harry Potter is my retirement.”

Richard Eyre, who directed Smith in a television production of “Suddenly Last Summer,” said she was “spiritually the smartest actress I’ve ever worked with.” You have to get up very, very early in the morning to watch Maggie Smith outsmart.”

“Jean Brodie,” in which she played a dangerously charismatic Edinburgh teacher, won her the 1969 Academy Award for Best Actress and also the British Academy Film Award (BAFTA).

Smith won an Oscar for supporting actress in 1978 for “California Suite,” Golden Globes for “California Suite” and “Room with a View,” and a BAFTA for lead actress in “A Private Function” in 1984 and “A Room with a View.” . 1986 and “The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne” 1988.

She also received Oscar nominations for Supporting Actress in Othello, Traveling with My Aunt, Room with a View and Gosford Park, as well as a BAFTA Award for Supporting Actress in Tea with Mussolini. On stage, she won a Tony in 1990 for Lettice and Love.

Her work in 2012 earned her three Golden Globe nominations for the globally successful television series Downton Abbey and the films The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and Quartet.

Smith had a reputation for being difficult and sometimes overshadowing others.

Richard Burton noted that Smith took on more than one scene with him in The VIPs: “She commits a grand theft.” However, director Peter Hall found Smith “not remotely difficult” “unless “She’s one of the idiots.” She’s very hard on herself, and I don’t think she sees any reason why she shouldn’t be hard on other people too.”

Smith acknowledged that she can be impatient at times.

“It’s true I don’t tolerate fools, but they don’t tolerate me either, so I’m prickly,” Smith said. “Maybe that’s why I’m pretty good at playing prickly older ladies.”

Critic Frank Rich, in a review of “Lettice and Lovage” in The New York Times, praised Smith as “the stylized classic that includes a line as prosaic as ‘Don’t you have any jam?’ can write in italics?” until it sounds like a freshly minted epigram from Coward or Wilde.”

Smith got laughs in a 1964 revival of Noel Coward’s Hay Fever with a prosaic line – “That haddock is disgusting”.

“But unfortunately it was mentioned by the critics, and after that there was nothing to laugh about,” she remembers. “The moment you say something is funny, it’s wafer-thin. It’s really gone.”

Margaret Natalie Smith was born on December 28, 1934 in Ilford, on the eastern edge of London. She summed up her life briefly: “One went to school, one wanted to act, one started acting, one is still acting.”

Her father was assigned to military service in Oxford in 1939, where her theater studies at the Oxford Playhouse School led to a busy education.

“I did so many things there at the universities, you know. … If you were smart enough, and I guess you were fast enough, you could do repeats almost every week because all the colleges were doing different productions at different times,” she said in a BBC interview.

She adopted Maggie as her stage name because another Margaret Smith was active in the theater.

Laurence Olivier recognized her talent, invited her to be part of his original National Theater company and cast her as his co-star in a 1965 film adaptation of Othello.

Smith said two directors, Ingmar Bergman and William Gaskill, both of whom appeared in National Theater productions, were important influences.

Alan Bennett, who was preparing to film the monologue “A Bed Among the Lentils,” said he was concerned about Smith’s reputation for being boring. As actor Jeremy Brett put it, “She starts divine and then goes down, more like a cheese.”

“The fact that we had just enough time to do it was really an absolute blessing because she was so fresh and so enthusiastic,” said Bennett, who also wrote a lead role for Smith in “The Lady in the Van.” ”

As flamboyant as she was on stage or in front of the camera, Smith was known for remaining very private.

Simon Callow, who starred with her in A Room with a View, said he ruined their first meeting with compliments.

“I blurted out all sorts of nonsense about her and she kind of backed off. “She doesn’t like that at all,” said Callow in a film portrait of the actress. “She never wanted to talk about acting. She was afraid to talk about acting because if she did, she would disappear.”

Smith was appointed Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1990, the equivalent of a knight.

She married fellow actor Robert Stephens in 1967. They had two sons, Christopher and Toby, and divorced in 1975. In the same year she married the writer Beverley Cross, who died in 1998.

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Associated Press writer Robert Barr contributed biographical material to this obituary before his death in 2018.